Sabbath comments

I don't really have time to ramble since I'm typing this a few days after Sunday....

David Vater, and his wife Karen (who has a different last name. Most women here don't take their husband's last name. It's a cultural thing, we hear. And when you ask them why they don't take their husband's last name, they say, how would I go about changing my name? with a kind of clueless expression. With the bureaucratic hassles we've been through here already, I don't blame them and wouldn't want to try to change my name either if I lived here) and their 3 sons (2 visible, 1 soon-to-be-born) came for lunch. We had interesting conversations about various problems in PR, about life here, life in the countryside (where Karen's mom is from. We hope to get to visit out her direction before we leave), what kinds of fruits grow around the island, etc.

Karen asked what the biggest culture "shock" has been for us. My initial answer was the trash everywhere, but in thinking it through, I think we have a short list of 3 things that continue to shock us and are hard to get over:
1. The bureaucracy

2. The cost of living

3. The trash (which reminds us that at some level, people aren't thinking about the future consequences of present actions)

Possibly a fourth item would be things related to living in a huge city - the crazy traffic jams, the crowded feeling, the sky-rise apartment buildings, etc. But honestly, these are easier for us to accept than the first three.